My practice is heavily influenced by my experiences travelling and living across Canada.

The constant negotiation of new spaces carried me from childhood into adulthood, impacting how I interact with people, places, and objects. I work primarily in sculpture and painting, and these lived experiences have impacted the way I view materials and orient myself in relation to my art. The continuous shifting of personal space is reflected in the way I identify as an artist: always trying something new. The act of experimenting with new materials means my sculptures become painterly, and my paintings become sculptural. I meld these fields together in my practice as I enjoy pushing the limitations of what a material can do, and what it means to interact with an object. I’ve focused on creating sculptures that push the idea of frontality – what the “front” of a sculpture is considered to be – aiming to have each angle of the sculpture offer a new perspective to the viewer as they move around. Physically orienting the body in space to the view of the art object is reminiscent of my worldview: with every new place I live and visit, my perception shifts.

As I’ve navigated the roads of new environments, my identity has shifted with my perspective. I’m drawn to the concept of gender norms and what distinguishes something as feminine versus masculine. I create artwork that navigates these themes by playing with colour, light, and reflection. I’ve honed in on the elements of femininity I had pulled away from in my youth – for example, the colour pink – and have utilized this in my art practice to explore what being a woman means to me. My aversion to the colour pink, and my now continued use of it in my work is my way of navigating internalized misogyny. My background in anthropology gives me knowledge of cultural practices as they relate to gender, while my lived experiences as a woman provide me with personal context that I reflect on.

My love of horror narratives combines with this research to create an ongoing interest in the grotesque feminine. I gravitate towards horror films and novels that explore body horror, found footage, feminism, gore, and monstrous creatures. These stories manifest in my work through distortion and materiality (the quality of a material). How a body is perceived in a given space is dependent on cultural context, and horror stories push this perception through the manipulation of expectations. I create art pieces that are full of juxtaposition – such as changing the shape of something hard to look soft or playing with the amount of light an object receives in order to reveal new angles.

As I work to explore these themes of the feminine and how I perceive myself under that label, my experimentation with how different materials work together is reminiscent of how I approach feminine identity: there is no one way to do something. There is a set of preconceived notions about how a material works and behaves that I like to push, just as I push what it means to be a woman. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to make art in my studio, and I believe the same goes for being a woman.